Quality of Life - Aged Care Consumers (QOL-ACC)

HOW DO WE MEASURE NON-CLINICAL OUTCOMES IN THE AGED CARE SECTOR?

The recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety’s ‘Final Report: Care, Dignity and Respect’ recommends the routine collection of quality of life data (Recommendation 22.2c) as part of quality assessments in aged care.

The Commission also recommended that our Quality of Care Experience instrument, developed during a project for the Royal Commission in 2020, be adopted as a valid measure of older people’s quality of care experience (Final Report 3A, page 133).

WHAT DO QUALITY OF CARE EXPERIENCE AND QUALITY LOOK LIKE FOR OLDER AUSTRALIANS RECEIVING AGED CARE SERVICES?

Our Health and Social Care Economics team at Flinders University has been engaged in aged care research since 2008. Partnering with aged care providers and consumers, we received funding from the Australian Research Council in late 2018 to develop a new quality of life instrument from the ground up with older Australians: the Quality of Life - Aged Care Consumers (QOL-ACC) instrument.

In 2020 we developed and validated a new quality of care experience instrument as part of our work for the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety: the Quality of Care Experience – Aged Care Consumers (QCE-ACC) instrument.

These complementary person-centred tools are validated instruments, simple to administer, and short at only six questions each.

Both instruments will shortly be released and are suitable for application in measuring and valuing quality of life and quality of care experience form the perspective of the older person for quality assessment and for economic evaluation. If you are interested in using these measures, please click on the link below to register your interest.